AUSSIE actor Chris Hemsworth and his Spanish wife Elsa Pataky have bought a small flat in Madrid's Chamberí district, partly as an investment and as a pied à terre, according to latest reports from the celebrity media.
Elsa, 44, grew up in and went to school in the Greater Madrid region, although she says she always knew she wanted to spread her wings – after moving to Los Angeles, California aged 27, the global screen star has now lived on three continents.
She was introduced to Hemsworth 11 years ago by her English teacher, so he could help her with her accent; on Christmas Day that same year, 2010, the couple married in secret on a beach in Indonesia.
The couple lives in an idyllic seafront villa in Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia, and they have three children – India Rose, born in Notting Hill, London, who will be nine in May, and twins Tristán and Sasha, born in Los Angeles, who celebrate their seventh birthday next month.
Despite her globe-trotting, Elsa has never severed ties with her home nation – she owns two companies in the capital, Inguz Society and Pataky Sartorius, S.L., both in the entertainment promotion and production industry and the first of these run by her mother, Cristina, a marketing consultant by profession.
Also, she has a top-floor 80-square-metre flat overlooking the elegant, sought-after main street in Madrid's Río Rosas area in the Chamberí neighbourhood (pictured above).
She never uses it, but has 'never got around to selling it', according to the entertainment media; and now, she and Hemsworth (inset, above right) have bought the smaller one next door in their joint names.
This one is 60 square metres and shares a spacious terrace with Elsa's existing property.
Full details of the two flats are not known, although the first would typically be large enough for three bedrooms and possibly a second, small bathroom, whilst the new addition would normally be about the right size for two bedrooms.
Signs pinned up on the outside of the new flat seem to show it is being renovated.
The couple do not have any plans to return to Spain permanently, however – in fact, they only moved into their Byron Bay villa last year.
Elsa, whose acting career post-Spain has included the rôle of Elena Neves in Fast & Furious films five to eight inclusive, is currently working on a screen adaptation of the Spanish opera Carmen, directed by Benjamin Millepied, husband of actress Natalie Portman.
She shares the set with Melissa Barrera, up-and-coming Hollywood star Paul Mescal, and legendary Spanish actress and 'Almodóvar Girl' Rossy de Palma.
Millepied had planned for his version of Carmen to be set in México and filmed between there and Los Angeles, but the pandemic put paid to the idea and, instead, has moved to Sydney.
Born Elsa Lafuente Medianu, the actress took her maternal grandmother's maiden name, Pataky, as her 'stage' surname.
She is half-Romanian – her mother Cristina Medianu Pataky met her father José Francisco Lafuente, a Spanish biochemist in the capital, Bucharest – and Romanian and Spanish are her joint native languages, although she is also fluent in English, French and Italian, which has allowed her to take on major parts in film and TV productions with scripts in all five of these tongues.
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